Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/42

 City he knocked for admission, but it was held for Queen Mary by a strong force under Lord William Howard, who replied: "Avaunt, traitor, thou shalt not come in here." Wyatt thereupon "rested him awhile upon a stall over against the Bell Savage gate," a few yards farther down Ludgate Hill, and then fought his way back to Temple Bar, where he surrendered. Lambarde also, writing in the second half of the same century, calls the inn the "Bell Savage" in mentioning it as one of the places to which people repaired to see bear-baiting, or interludes, or fence play; while in a "discourse" published in 1595, entitled "Marococcus Extaticus," the name appears as "'Belsavage." In "Kenilworth" Sir Walter Scott gives the name in the form in which we find it in Stow and Lambarde, describing how Wayland, the smith, after his visit to Zacharias, the Jew, to procure drugs, returned to "the famous Bell Savage" and there compounded them. In the seventeenth century, in an advertisement in the London Gazette for February 15, 1676, the name is still cited as the "Bell Savage," but a few years later (1683) it appears in the same periodical as the "Bell and Savage."

There is little mystery, then, about the origin of "Bell Savage" as the title of the inn. But some antiquaries prefer ingenious surmise to plain fact, and at least half a score of theories have been elaborated to account for the name. In one of them, adopted in no very responsible mood by Thackeray in "The Four Georges," La Belle Sauvage is identified with Pocahontas, because Captain John Smith, the gallant adventurer whose life the daughter of Powhatan saved is buried in the church of St. Sepulchre, Holborn, but a stone's-throw away from the old tavern. Another theory, which found some favour with Walter Thornbury, author of the early part of "Old and New London," traces the name to a Mistress Isabel, or Isabella, Savage, assumed to have kept the inn once upon a time, after whom it was called the "Bell Savage," and later "La Belle Sauvage." This derivation has the merit of simplicity, and its only defect is that no